Reflection on the CANCÚN, Mexico United Nations climate change conference.

The conference began with modest aims and it created modest achievements. Cancún may be considered more successful than Copenhagen, but not by much.  The agreement reached would see an increase in global warming by 4 degrees Celsius not the 2 degrees originally agreed at Kyoto. It was still largely rhetoric where the vested interests of individual nation states took precedence over the greater interests of all in the global community.

A lot of my writings have been on the subject of sustainability.  Why? Because the resources challenges and climate change seems to be the major concern people I meet have.  In his 1969 book ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’, published in the year the Apollo mission to the moon was completed Richard Buckminster-Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) issued a challenge to the world that it use its brainpower to invent a society capable of living on the planet forever, or face extinction. 

 Thirty years on in their 1999 book ‘Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution”, Paul Hawken, Amory B Lovins, and L Hunter Lovins, commented that “Humankind has inherited a 3.8 billion-year store of natural capital.  At present rates of use and degradation, there will be little left by the end of the next century”.

 In 2003 in his book “Growth Fetish”, Clive Hamilton supported this view and drove home the inevitability of major dysfunctional consequences of the everlasting western pursuit of never ending growth and the devastating cost this is having on the ordinary, everyday happiness of people by replacing purpose and meaning with material “things” designed to make us happy.  Hamilton shows us the opposite is true. Growth Fetish was the first serious attempt at a politics of change for rich countries dominated by the sickness of affluence, where the real yearning is not for more money, but for authentic identity, and where the future lies in creating a society that promotes the things that really do improve our well-being.

 This is still an adaptive leadership challenge.  Sure there are many technical issues that need to be resolved but overall the adaptive leadership challenge still seems to be how can nations all work better together in order to meet our purpose of saving the planet for future generations.